I've done this. The NIF worked as in that it ran and was a correct enough NIF. It did not work in terms of solving what I needed it to do. Iteration was a bit painful because it was tangled with a nasty library that needed to be cross-compiled. So when I made a change it seg faulted and I bailed.
I essentially ran out of patience and tried another approach. It involved an LLM running C code so I could check the library output compared to my implementation to make sure it was byte-for-byte.
The C will never ship. I don't have practice writing C so I am very inefficient at it. I read it okay. LLMs are pretty decent help for this type of scrap code.
Comments
I've done this. The NIF worked as in that it ran and was a correct enough NIF. It did not work in terms of solving what I needed it to do. Iteration was a bit painful because it was tangled with a nasty library that needed to be cross-compiled. So when I made a change it seg faulted and I bailed.
I essentially ran out of patience and tried another approach. It involved an LLM running C code so I could check the library output compared to my implementation to make sure it was byte-for-byte.
The C will never ship. I don't have practice writing C so I am very inefficient at it. I read it okay. LLMs are pretty decent help for this type of scrap code.